A nation’s survival isn’t “racism”

It may surprise some Americans to learn that almost one-quarter of the people living in Switzerland are foreigners. Even so, just over 50 percent voted last month to cap immigration, which, unchecked, could leave indigenous Swiss a minority in 50 years. Newsweek’s headline over the story was typical: “Switzerland’s Sudden Fear of Immigrants.”

Fear. Immigrants. The German publication Spiegel Online wrote also about “scaremongering.” The enlightened reader’s thought-bubble is now supposed to register the word “racism.” But was it really “fear of immigrants” — read: “racism” — that drove sufficient numbers of Swiss to the polls to check their own demographic extinction as a recognizable culture and nation-state? Or was it a nearly anachronistic instinct to survive as a recognizable culture and nation-state?

I see it as the instinct to survive — and applaud the Swiss for deciding to limit the influx of Europeans, Slavs, Muslims, Africans and others, whose demographic waves are otherwise sure to transform indigenous Swiss culture into a global multiculture. I also envy them for mustering this basic vital sign, this narrow-edged popular will to control their own borders. It is something that has all but flat-lined in America, where capping immigration — let alone halting it to attempt some measure of assimilation and economic resuscitation — is not even a part of the political debate.

Why isn’t it? In the U.S., the foreign-born population is now estimated to be around 13 percent, and it’s rising every year. This poses truly existential problems, particularly since the concept of “melting” into American culture was junked long ago — along with “American” culture. Meanwhile, that overall percentage, a little more than one in 10, masks the greater density and impact of foreign-born populations in the states and cities where immigrants and illegal aliens congregate.

Take California, a state where waves of mainly Mexican arrivals (legal and illegal) have turned the population 38 percent Hispanic/Latino. In Los Angeles County, the figure jumps to 48 percent. The next largest ethnic group is non-Hispanic white: 27 percent — almost down to one in four. In 1960, not long before I was born in L.A., non-Hispanic whites were 82 percent of the county. What we are looking at is population replacement — and it has taken place well inside the span of one lifetime.

Such population replacement is underway everywhere non-assimilable blocs become entrenched — with or without “amnesty.” But We, the People, have never voted for it. It just happens, forced or enabled from above. It could be that a majority of us want to disappear in a global multiculture — or, in the case of states like California, into an enclave-pocked Mexican monoculture. But that’s not why we have borders and immigration laws. Tragically, we also have a political class and presidents who lawlessly refuse to enforce these laws, making a mockery of our borders, not to mention the democratic process. This makes a mockery of our nationhood, too. It looks like a means to an end — the end of that nationhood.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., is one shining exception to this treacherous rule. In fact, just how exceptional Sessions is becomes clear upon reading his description in a recent report by The Hill on Sessions’ sensational findings that the Obama administration, through executive orders and directives, has “already granted de facto amnesty to millions of illegal U.S. residents.” The Hill describes Sessions as “a vocal opponent of granting citizenship to illegal immigrants.” Once upon a time, opposition to conferring citizenship on people here illegally would have been wholly unremarkable and thus unremarked upon. No more.

What happened? If we consider the typical reaction to the recent Swiss vote — denigration of a nation’s survival instinct as a primitive expression of fear and racism — we will recognize the mechanism of our own demise: silence and retreat in the face of endless recrimination and grievance-mongering. What a way to lose a country.

And what a way to lose a world — the “Western” world, where this same pattern repeats almost everywhere. The demographics of The Hague, Netherlands, for example, are not too dissimilar from those in California. As in other major Dutch cities, about half of the people living there are from another country, with non-Western immigrants, mainly Muslim and often Moroccan, making up over one-third of the population. That non-Western figure approaches the halfway mark in the under-21 demographic. Short of a sharp reversal and coupled with high rates of Dutch out-migration, it becomes highly unlikely that the future of the Dutch seat of government will be Dutch.

Is it “fear” and “scaremongering” to point this out? Is it “racism” to oppose the demographic obliteration of a nation clearly underway? According to what is aptly described as the Dutch establishment — from the prime minister, leading mayors, Dutch media, plus, quite shockingly, the U.S. ambassador, who, in a break with diplomatic etiquette, has publicly commented on Dutch affairs — the answer to both questions is yes. This past week has seen yet another public hate campaign by this establishment to smear, demonize and thus neutralize the one Dutch party that opposes the nation’s suicide — the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders.

I’ve written more on these events at my blog www.dianawest.net. For now, it’s worth noting that the Dutch are lucky. With the steadfast and brilliant Wilders leading a popular movement, at least they have a chance to survive.

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Diana West blogs at dianawest.net, and she can be contacted via dianawest@verizon.net. Follow her on Twitter @diana_west_.